Better Times

“The Artist” and “The Descendants.”

Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo in a movie directed by Michel Hazanavicius.Credit Illustration by Andy Friedman

What happens in “The Artist” is simple enough. A film star by the name of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) streaks across the Hollywood heavens in the late nineteen-twenties, and then, with the advent of sound, gutters and falls. Only the love of a good woman has the power to relight his fuse. To movie nuts reared on “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Sunset Boulevard,” and “A Star Is Born,” this film could hardly be more welcome; I would wager that its writer and director, Michel Hazanavicius, represents the final word in nuthood. But here’s the rub, the sportive twist that prevents his work from being a mere rehash of twice-told tales: “The Artist” is not just about black-and-white silent pictures. It is a black-and-white silent picture. And it’s French.

Two principles are in play here. One, “The Artist” will cleave—far more loyally than Mel Brooks’s “Silent Movie” (1976) did—to the rules of the game, supplying not just printed titles but a breathless musical score, unblushing melodrama, a bouquet of sight gags, a girl with a kiss curl, and a corpulent cop. And, two, Hazanavicius will toy with those rules in the Frenchest possible manner. The very first thing we see, for example, is an open mouth, belonging to a man under interrogation. “I won’t talk. I won’t say a word,” he says. Yet those words themselves go unsaid, flashed up instead on a black screen. He couldn’t talk, even if he crumpled; everything in this world must be seen, not heard. I am tempted to reveal the brief and brilliant exceptions that Hazanavicius provides even to that stricture, but I, too, must keep quiet.

There are notable bit parts in “The Artist,” not least for John Goodman, as a harrumphing bull of a studio boss, and James Cromwell, as a faithful chauffeur and helpmeet, a sort of anti-Erich von Stroheim. Better still, we get Uggy, who plays Valentin’s no less constant mutt, a barking echo of Asta, the wirehaired genius of “The Thin Man,” “Bringing up Baby,” and “The Awful Truth.” It is Dujardin, though, in his portrait of the artist as a dashing mute, who best raises the ghost of an era. The two-second shot in which, on set, as the cameras roll, Valentin locks into a brooding frown—the standby of the questing smolderer—earns a laugh for sheer precision, and, behind such face-making, you sense a lot of homework. He has an oily dab of his compatriot Maurice Chevalier, plus a stronger dose of Douglas Fairbanks, including the neat yet unvillainous mustache and the elastic bonhomie, joshing with camera crews as he does with reverent fans. The most acute reference, however, is to John Gilbert—a top lion at M-G-M in the mid-twenties but dead within a decade, liquidated by drink and the lethal demands of speech.

A crux of “The Artist” finds Valentin toiling on a scene in which he must revolve between partners on a dance floor. One fellow-waltzer is played by Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a lithe young laugher into whom he has previously bumped. She is a nobody, a casual extra, except that, when they grasp each other en passant, and as take follows take, she becomes, imperceptibly, a somebody. From the crucible of this moment, indeed, she will glow into a leading light in Valentin’s heart, and a movie star in her own right. The gesture intended here, I think, is toward “Flesh and the Devil,” the silent romance that Gilbert made with Greta Garbo, in 1926. They, too, danced lightly but dangerously together, and the motion led them, as if hypnotized, into a garden, where they shared one of the fiercest and most fondant kisses in the history of movies, or of mouths. Gilbert and Garbo, like Valentin and Peppy, fell in love for real, or as real as Hollywood could allow. (“Flesh and the Devil” shows at Film Forum on November 28th, three days after “The Artist” is released. Try both, on a moonstruck night.)

Word of this tacit new film has spread since it showed at Cannes, in May, and much of its allure is due to the speed—eager and uncomplaining—with which you feel the audience, innocents as well as buffs, acclimatizing to its antiquated modes. Here is a crowd-pleaser that makes you glad to be part of the crowd, perhaps because—to adopt the classical viewpoint—silent cinema really was the purest and most binding incarnation of the medium, one from which we have torn ourselves, to our detriment, ever since. That is why “The Artist” seems instantly easy on the mind’s eye, and why we feel a natural tug of resistance when Peppy, the bright spark of sound, declares to an interviewer, “Make way for the young!” What Hazanavicius has wrought is damnably clever, but not cute; less like an arch conceit and more like the needle-sharp recollection of a dream. It is, above all, a Gallic specialty—the intellectual caprice that applies a surprising emotional jolt. One finds the same mixture in Cocteau’s “Orphée,” which transmitted Greek myths as if in a live broadcast, and in Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” which sought not so much to mimic Baroque musical form as to uncover a vitalizing force within the act of homage. When challenged over the seeming levity of the piece, Ravel replied, “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence,” and that will stand as a motto for “The Artist”—a spry monochrome comedy that is tinted with regret for the rackety noise and color, as far as we can hope to imagine them, of lost time. Make way for the old!

The first thing you need to know about Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” is that it takes place in Hawaii. Not that we spend our time gazing at the glory of the islands; there’s a lavish crane shot in which Matt King (George Clooney) points out the unspoiled patch of coastal land that his family has owned for generations, but Payne prefers to focus on the foreground, and on the battle of the Kings.

Matt and his extended clan are preparing to sell their swath of Eden for development, a deal that will bring them riches untold—so long as Matt, in his capacity as chief trustee, agrees to sign it. He seems distracted, though, and no wonder, for his wife, recently injured in a boating accident, lies in a hospital, sunk in a coma from which, he is told, she will never wake. Matt’s first task is to break the news to his daughters, ten-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and her grouchy teen-aged sister, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley). Hitherto he has been, as he admits, “the backup parent, the understudy,” and now comes his bid to assume the leading role.

This is fairly fresh terrain for Clooney, though it verges on the haplessness of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Watch Matt as he breaks into a puffing sprint, his gallop rendered not just unmanly but frankly girlish by the clop of his boat shoes, which seem to be compulsory for all citizens. The reason for Matt’s haste is that, via friends, he has learned of Elizabeth’s disloyalty. Before the crash, she was cheating on him with a real-estate agent named Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), and, though Matt confronts her in the hospital, ranting vainly at her motionless form, what he really yearns to do is meet Brian, face to face. And what he really fears to do is take a look at himself.

In short, “The Descendants” is the latest exhibit in Payne’s careful dissection of the beached male, which runs from Matthew Broderick’s character in “Election” to Jack Nicholson’s in “About Schmidt” and Paul Giamatti’s in “Sideways.” The younger creatures in the new film—well played by Woodley and Miller, with a special mention to Nick Krause, who triumphs in the role of Sid, Alexandra’s stoner pal—may look baffled, but they are fighting to make something of their lives, whereas you get an inescapable sense that the lives of the older guys have already been made for them. Lillard’s little-boy grin, though ideal for selling real estate, tells of panic rather than cheekiness, and Brian’s encounter with Matt is not a clash of rutting males but a semi-polite standoff between two fleshy, faltering souls, striving to live up to the brazenness of their shirts.

We have seen such leisurewear before, on Frank Sinatra and Montgomery Clift, as they toured the local bars, in “From Here to Eternity.” Both films are infused with the atmosphere of their Hawaiian setting, and its strange compound of chillout and treachery. Everyone remembers Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in the surf, but stay with that scene and you soon find it foaming with accusation and shame. Something similar happens to “The Descendants,” with damp squalls and difficult mists nagging at the edge of people’s amicable warmth. Both films conclude, too, with floral garlands cast into the ocean, though Payne provides an aftermath—a delicious downtime, in which Matt and his children sit on the couch with ice cream and watch TV. Death, which has loomed ahead throughout, begins to drift away behind them, and the film completes its journey: from eternity to here. ♦